Reform
Week 13
Mainstream Progressive Currents
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Local level
State
National
Cultural
– Progressivism
culminates at nat’l
level in 1912, when
all 4 pres candidates
run on variant of
progressive platform
And the other side: cultural
imperialism, racism, vigilantism
• Improving health
care
• Child labor, 8hr
days
• Education in urban
communities
• Limiting power of
railroads and other
corps
• Trust-busting
• Conservation
• Financial reform
• Muckraking
journalism
Women and Reform
• Settlement Houses (Jane Addams, Hull
House, 1889) provide medical care, day
nurseries, boardinghouses, art galleries, and
music schools
• Florence Kelly’s report on sweatshops leads
to state legislation banning child labor, limit hr
day for women, abolition tenement labor
• Kelly’s Hull House Maps and Papers (1895)
first scientific study of poverty in America
• Kelly and Lillian Wald est. NY Child Labor
Committee and helped to create US
Children’s Bureau in 1912
• College educated women find public authority
and influence (The New Woman)
Popular Journals and Social Criticism
• McClure’s nationwide
readership
• Specialized in
“muckraking”
journalism
• Exposes of poverty,
abuses of big business
Muckraking Journalism and the Power
of the Press
• Begins with Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives (1890) about
NYC’s poor
• SS McClure creates first large circulation magazine, McClure’s
(1893)
• Read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) about poor sanitation and
working conditions of meatpacking industry
• Ida Tarbell’s History of Standard Oil (1904) reveals Rockefeller’s
ruthless business practices
• Ida Wells of Memphis challenges myth that lynchings were response when
black men attempted to rape white women—actually white businessmen
targeting prosperous blacks (A Red Record, 1895)
Ending child labor
• 1890 census revealed that more than 1 million children, 10 to 15 years old,
worked in America. That number increased to 2 million by 1910
• Industries employed 5 or 6 yr olds to work as many as 18 to 20 hours a day
• Keating-Owen Act passed in 1916 but later declared unconstitutional on the
grounds that Congress could not regulate local labor conditions
• Smith-Hughes Act (1917) provided 1 million dollars to states that agreed to
improve their public schools by providing vocational education programs
• Wilson approved "Tax on Employment of Child Labor“ (1919)- placed 10%
tax on net profits of businesses employing children under age 14 or made
them work 8+ hrs/day, 6 days a week. (later declared unconstitutional)
• Number of working children between ages 10 and 15 declined by almost
50% between 1910 and 1920
• There was still a great deal of opposition to a national amendment against
child labor. Opponents labelled the proposed amendment a communist
idea that would control the nation's businesses
By 1929 every state banned children under 14 from working. 36 states had
laws that prohibited factory workers under 16 from working at night or for
more than eight hours/day
Young Coal Miners
Women’s Movement
• Suffrage, state by state beginning in 1869
• “Birth control” coined by Margaret Sanger in 1913
• Although many progressive women oppose
involvement in WWI, Carrie Chapman Catt
believes patriotism will aid their cause
• Wilson’s support gets amendment passed; ratified
by adequate state legislatures in 1920
• Most historians agree women’s movement loses
steam after suffrage but progressive political
reform continues in 1920s (Sheppard-Towner Act
for maternal health care)
Trust-busting
• 1890 Sherman Anti-trust Act– a paper tiger since
courts sided exclusively with the corporations
• 1902 directs justice dept to go after the corporations
(JP Morgan’s Northern Securities dissolved 5-4 in
Supreme Court)
• 1906 Hepburn Act helps regulate railroads
• 1913 Income Tax Amendment
• 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act exempts Unions from
being prosecuted as trusts
Cartoon of TR
handling big
business
Wider Reform
• 1905 US Forest
Service
• 1906 Pure Food and
Drug Act, Meat
Inspection Act
• Children’s Bureau
(1912) later manages
Shepperd Towner Act
(1920)
• 1916 National Park
Service Created
Above: Teddy Roosevelt and John
Muir, the man who campaigned to
save Yosemite Valley from
development (1903)
Censorship and Public Control
Motion Picture Industry: largely developed by immigrant Jewish businessmen
•Theatrical showings in working-class urban areas
•Cheap entertainment which didn’t demand literacy
•Progressive reformers and middle class begin to worry about controlling its
impact on masses
•1908, Jesse James Boys in Missouri and Night Riders banned in Chicago
•NAACP (1909) attempts to censor Birth of a Nation (Boston and Chicago remove
racially offensive scenes)
•1915, the US Supreme Court decided the case Mutual Film Corporation v.
Industrial Commission of Ohio in which the court determined that motion pictures
were purely commerce and not an art, and thus not covered by the First
Amendment.
From Progressivism to War
• Most progressives oppose entrance into First World War, yet
once war declared, progressive spirit also mobilized
• Growing disillusionment: Belief that American big business
helped finance British War machine and by 1917 needed
bailing out
• America re-elects Wilson on slogan “He Kept Us Out of
War”
• Combination of Z telegram and German sub warfare pushes
public opinion towards intervention
• 114,000 military deaths (53K combat); 4 million mobilized
• Historians go to work for George Creel’s infamous
Committee for Public Information fabricating anti-German
war propaganda (later revealed in press)
• Post-war retrenchment; rejection of Versailles Treaty:
Wilson’s 14 points and efforts to reform come to nothing
Industrial Workers of the World
1905, leaders of Western Mining Federation and Socialist
party form
•Bill Haywood head of IWW: “The working class and the
employing class have nothing in common…Between these
two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the
world unite as a class.”
•Organized anyone, unlike the AFL– migrant workers
included
•July 12, 1917, 2000 vigilantes deported 1400 miners from
Bisbee, AZ where they were left in the New Mexican
deserts. Bisbee was at the heart of copper industry and
labour (AFL and IWW had been competing to organize
workers). In order to crush an IWW strike, businessmen
planned strike
•No one was convicted for the act
Return of the Espionage (1917) and Sedition
Act (1918)
• Designed to crush anti war support
• Espionage Act: Up to 20 year imprisonment at 10K fine–
no desertion, interfering with recruiting or aiding the
enemy and no putting anything treasonous in the post
office (included pro-Irish and Anti-British publications
• Mailing rights of The Masses and 45 newspapers revoked
• FBI created
• Sedition Act outlawed “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous
or abusive language intended to cause contempt, scorn,
contumely or disrepute” to the govt (2100 cases
brought to trial including Eugene Debs)
At a Crossroads: America after the First
World War
• 1919: 4 million workers strike for right to join
unions and bargain collectively—3,600 strikes
nationwide. Steel strike broken with military force
• Justice department deports hundreds of
undesirable ‘radicals’ to Russia
• 1920 Red bomb scare in New York City
• 1920: Presidential candidate Eugene Debs in jail:
serving 10-year sentence for wartime sedition
• Women gain vote August 1920
• Race riots break out in big cities like Chicago
Effects of War
• US goes from debtor to creditor nation
• Poised for superpower status
• Mass production economy—switch from wartime
industrial to domestic consumer
• Relationship of big business and labor
• Agricultural depression strikes following postwar
cut in demand: farmers never recover
• Disillusionment and disaffected youth
• End of progressivism?
Chicago steel workers on strike,
September 22, 1919
• September 16, 1920: a truck loaded with dynamite
explodes at corner of Wall and Broad Streets
Social Control
• Women head WCTU (1874) in last few
decades of 19thC
• Political as well as social forum—local
chapters provide homeless shelters,
nurseries, advocate women’s suffrage,
prison reform
• Anti-Saloon League (1893) more narrow
and attacks liquor—also feeds on fear of
immigrants and the cities
• Prohibition—social betterment or cultural
imperialism?
Progressivism, and Cultural
Imperialism
• 18th Amendment a hangover from progressive
era
• Ban on alcohol partially intended to manage
immigrant workers and southeast European
immigrant cultures
• Springs from fear of urban immigrant
populations
• 1920s sees rise of crime due to prohibition,
but also massive nativism and antiCatholicism
Prohibition (1920-1933)
• Bootleg Battles: The
St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1929)
Government anger over prohibition violations targets
ethnic minorities as gangsters
Al
Capone
on
vacation
Targeting Immigrants
• Postwar fears of strikes, communism and
anarchist combine white middleclass
xenophobia (Sacco and Vanzetti trial, 1927)
• Johnson-Reed Act (1924) severely limits
Southern and Eastern European immigration
• Native Americans finally made citizens (1924)–
many speculate because there are too few to
make any ‘trouble’– also feeds into white
‘vanishing race’ fears pushed by eugenicists
from the turn of century